Amaze Your Shoppers with Ease

A recent Retail Customer Experience posting recommends the IKEA idea: Design your store so shoppers move through the aisles as though they are navigating a maze, with the one-way path abundantly clear. One argument is that mazes let you demonstrate to shoppers the products in use before offering the products for sale. Arouse the desire to buy, then show the product to buy. By having little showrooms, beat showrooming—where consumers come into your bricks-and-mortar store, draining the brains of you and your staff for advice and training, and follow up by leaving your store to make the purchase online.
     The shortfall in this advice for you might be that you aren’t like IKEA. The maze layout with showrooms requires a large store footprint and shoppers who are willing to spend at least half an hour navigating the maze. Plus the reality is that most retailers are often already asking shoppers to navigate a psychological maze. What we can learn from IKEA, though, is the virtue of easy navigation.
     Findings from researchers at New York University remind us that with any unfamiliar item, the shopper has at least a little extra trouble navigating the maze that leads up to purchase. Help the shopper get there. In ads, signage, and face-to-face selling, work in phrases like, “…the same way as with the brand you’re accustomed to using…,” and “…once you do this a few times, it will be as second nature to you as what you’ve been doing up to now….”
     To accompany the new item, have ample easy-to-understand instructions. Don’t worry if shoppers give the instructions only a glance. For one thing, there is research showing how knowing written instructions exist can be sufficiently reassuring for the customers. They don’t need to read them to feel comfortable. For another thing, we want to make it easy for the purchaser to learn how to use the product or service when they have questions later.
     Keep familiar elements in the format of the marketing and merchandising, too. Sure, when introducing a brand or product line, you can boost excitement by premiering a fresh look in your ads and in the layout of the department. But unless you’re launching a completely new business format, leave enough the same so that customers don’t forget who you are.
     People complete mazes most quickly when there are signposts and benchmarks they can recognize and understand.

Click below for more: 
Showboat a Bit with Showrooming Shoppers 
Use Familiar Routines to Sell the Unfamiliar